British budget day is surrounded by ceremony and a few peculiar rituals as well. We are all familiar with the beaming gentlemen (chancellors have all been men) holding the budget box aloft for the cameras on the big day, but the chancellor is allowed a tipple to steady his nerves as he works his way through the speech in the Commons. Nigel Lawson and the ebullient Ken Clarke favoured whiskey, but the mannered Hugh Dalton drank rum and milk, which he poured from a silver coffeepot.

Chancellors are blamed by the public for Britain's woes, denigrated by colleagues and criticised by experts. Holt argues that few chancellors have been willing or able to take the initiative and have remained trapped in the business of managing rather than redesigning the economic system. He says they are over-blamed: Holt sees the failure to get involved in European integration at the beginning of the project as the biggest failure of British economic policy since 1945. Footdragging chancellors

were at fault, but others also, prime ministers especially. Chancellors were chained to sentimental post-imperial thinking: who needs Europe when you have an imaginary empire?

Holt points out that post-war Britain did not have a strong pro-Europe leader. If Harold Macmillan had been more plucky in his pro-Europeanism the UK might have been able to join during the golden age of growth, making life easier afterwards for the incumbents in the Treasury. Instead the UK joined the EEC in time for the stagflation of the 1970s, when the institutions of Europe had crystallised in ways uncomfortable for Britain. It's a tough job being number two in a government. But Holt thinks the fact that Tony Blair is not a frustrated would-be chancellor, unlike Margaret Thatcher, augurs well for Gordon Brown. But if the British economy heads up the creek a rerun of the Thatcher-Lawson battle is not impossible.

Second Amongst Equals is a comprehensive study of British economic policy in the last 50 years and Richard Holt knows the ground well. If the book has a fault it is that the message is sometimes obscured by too much detail, and Holt's careful sense of ideological balance can be frustrating. But he is not afraid to deliver the punches on the failure of Britain to engage with Europe and it is these sections in the book that may be of most interest to Irish readers.

jmulqueen@irish-times.ie